Word: saura
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...CARLOS SAURA'S The Garden of Delights is a cultural parable, and like most such parables, its narrative surface verges on the inane...
This is the stuff that makes bad melodrama, and Saura knows it and is indifferent to it- because he cares nothing for his plot. Given the story situation, he could have made the film into a psychological study, a detective story, or a lover's confrontation. But his aim is merely to tease the possibilities of all three, just enough to provide a context for his real interest which is to create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast...
Given the political nature of the subject, the temptation is toward a hopelessly academic treatment, but Saura, for the most part, avoids high-minded moralist (though there is in particular one strained metaphor of a paralyzed right hand for right-wing ideology). Like Bosch's fifteenth century painting from which Saura takes his title, the film tries to step inside the allegory it sets up and give itself to a wide-eyed fascination with the workings of vice. Saura has learned from Bunuel, whom he openly imitates at times, how to use sensual indulgences to make an intellectual point...
...situation. He is at once the original perpetrator of all the confusion acted out on screen and at the same time a passive halfwit naively fearful of that confusion. Amnesiac Antonio has no desire to assume once again the position of capitalist tycoon Antonio. And this duality allows Saura a means of criticism from the inside...
Writer-Director Carlos Saura's achievement is to arouse concern for a markedly unsympathetic crew in a credible horror story, drawing upon the well-documented history of mankind's particular gift for committing violence against his own species...